Striking a blow against fascism with commentary on current events, finance, economics, politics, music, art, culture and how to deal with our economic lives being bartered away by the elites who have our financial future all figured out: We'll be paying off their debts forever.

If you like what you read here, please make a donation to Pottersville2. Peace to all and let's work to end the wars.

"We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth." - Sydney Schanberg

"The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft, / And gathering swallows twitter in the skies." - John Keats

"It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen ... The world will present itself to you for its unmasking." - Franz Kafka

"“We of the craft are all crazy,” wrote Lord Byron about himself and his fellow poets. “Some are affected by gaiety, others by melancholy, but all are more or less touched.”"

"The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it." - Albert Einstein

"In my lifetime we've gone from Eisenhower to George W. Bush. If this is evolution, I believe within twelve years we'll be voting for plants." - Lewis Black

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." – George Orwell

Senator Frank Church in 1975 chaired the Senate Hearings on the FBI’s Cointelpro operation, which spied upon and attempted to infiltrate, disrupt and discredit the peace movement. . . "if a dictator ever took over, (the NSA) could enable to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back. . . . That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. . . . I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."

Cirze's World

Translate

Conservative Animus

_________________
Conservatism is the theoretical voice of this animus against the agency of the subordinate classes. It provides the most consistent and profound argument as to why the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, why they should not be allowed to govern themselves or the polity. Submission is their first duty, agency, the prerogative of the elite.

Current Readers

Politicus USA on GOP Fascism

_________________

The entire GOP apparatus is slipping toward fascism and millions of Americans have been indoctrinated to believe that the Bible none of them have read takes precedence over the Constitution none of them have read.

This is an ad free blog

Follow by Email

At the beach

Waiting for Grand Dad

Cirze's World

Eco Farm Shitakes, Squash, Kale - Cindi, Nicole & Eddie

Ukraine Disinformation Battle: Little Green Men, Hamsters and the Fog of War

________________
There has always been a gap in how media on both sides of the former Iron Curtain have reported world events, and it’s growing as the crisis in Ukraine escalates. It has become increasingly difficult to obtain reliable information from any side — west, east, or further east — about what is going on in Eastern Ukraine.
While powerful propaganda machines fill the public space with smoke and mirrors, one of the few facts that can be positively established in Eastern Ukraine is that the body count is steadily growing: a testament of just how easy it is for self-interested foreign powers to start, either intentionally or recklessly, a civil war in the heart of Europe. Continuing coverage is available at this link and this link.

Cirze's World

Red Roots Farm - Kristen & Jason - No Sprays/Delicious Veggies!

Fukushima, Japan Disaster Worsens and Spreads

________________
While the American reactor industry continues to suck billions of dollars from the public treasury, its allies in the corporate media seem increasingly hesitant to cover the news of post-Fukushima Japan. Continuing coverage is available at this link, this link, and this link.

My Blog Fights Climate Change

Cirze's World

Animal Rescue - Click Everyday!

Cirze's World

Paul Krugman:

I don’t think many people grasp just how raw, how explicit, the corruption of our institutions has become.

Yesterday I had a conversation with someone who, like me, spent most of the Bush years as a voice in the wilderness. And he pointed out something remarkable: although those of us who said the obvious — that the Bush administration was fundamentally monstrous — were ridiculed by all the respectable people at the time, at this point our narrative has become everyone’s narrative.

Cirze's World

Paul Craig Roberts:

_________________ US Media
_________________

"Anyone who depends on print, TV, or right-wing talk radio media is totally misinformed. The Bush administration has achieved a de facto Ministry of Propaganda."

"The uniformity of the US media has become much more complete since the days of the cold war. During the 1990s, the US government permitted an unconscionable concentration of print and broadcast media that terminated the independence of the media.

Today the US media is owned by 5 giant companies in which pro-Zionist Jews have disproportionate influence. More importantly, the values of the conglomerates reside in the broadcast licenses, which are granted by the government, and the corporations are run by corporate executives — not by journalists — whose eyes are on advertising revenues and the avoidance of controversy that might produce boycotts or upset advertisers and subscribers.

Americans who rely on the totally corrupt corporate media have no idea what is happening anywhere on earth, much less at home."

_________________ War On Terror
_________________

Roberts asked "Is the War on Terror a Hoax", and claims it has "killed, maimed, dislocated, and made widows and orphans of millions of Muslims in six countries". Roberts called the attacks "naked aggression" on civilian populations and infrastructure which constitute war crimes.

_________________ Republican Party
_________________

Roberts is seriously dismayed by what he considers the Republican Party's disregard for the U.S. Constitution. He has even voiced his regret that he ever worked for it, avowing that, had he known what it would become, he would never have contributed to the Reagan Revolution.

_________________ American Democracy and Oligarchy
_________________

Roberts has been increasingly critical of what he deems as the lessening of democracy in the U.S.; instead accusing it of being run by oligarchs by stating:

"The west prides itself that it is the standard for the world, that it is a democracy. But nowhere do you see democratic outcomes: not in Greece, not in Ireland, not in the UK, not here, the outcomes are always to punish the innocent and reward the guilty.

And that's what the Greeks are in the streets protesting. We see this all over the west. There is no democracy, there are oligarchies, some of these smaller European countries are not even run by their own governments, they are run by Wall Street... There is probably more democracy in China than there is in the west.

Revolution is the only answer... We are confronted with a curious situation. Throughout the west we think we have democracy, we hold ourselves up high, we demonize China, we talk about the mafia state of Russia, we talk about the Arabs and so on, but where is the democracy here?"

_________________ Farewell Speech
_________________

"Truth Has Fallen and Taken Liberty With It,"

Roberts effectively announced his journalistic retirement. The article, published at Counterpunch.org, begins:

"There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest."

It proceeds to a bitter chronicle of the demise of American intellectual integrity, particularly that of financial journalists and economists. These have been thoroughly corrupted by monetary inducements to misrepresent and ignore what has been, in effect, the systematic dismantling of the nation's productive life, in the name of globalization.

He holds the members of his own journalistic profession largely responsible for abetting relentless outsourcing of American industry, thereby gutting the American middle class and effectively dooming the nation's future.

He describes his own ostracism from mainstream media access, the consequence of his relentless and unflinching criticism of the demolition process over the past decade. His column ends, "The militarism of the U.S. and Israeli states, and Wall Street and corporate greed, will now run their course. As the pen is censored and its might extinguished, I am signing off."

_________________

Cirze's World

Liberal?

"If by a 'Liberal' they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people — their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties — someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a “Liberal,” then I’m proud to say I’m a “Liberal."

John F. Kennedy, 1960

________________

Citizen's United

"[T]his Court now concludes that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption. That speakers may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that those officials are corrupt. And the appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in this democracy."

With the decline of manufacturing jobs in the rust belt having become a significant issue in this turbulent election year, the arrival of the play in New York, where it opened on Thursday at the Public Theater after originating at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, could hardly be more timely. But the issues it explores have been making headlines for years.

Much of the play takes place in 2000, with a prologue and other scenes that are set eight years later. In the prologue, we meet two men, still young, in encounters with their parole officer. One is the truculent, uncooperative Jason (Will Pullen), who’s white and doesn’t seem interested in resuming a fruitful life; the other, the black Chris (Khris Davis), is doing his best to get back on track. Both Jason and Chris, we gather, were convicted of the same crime, although its details remain unmentioned, stoking suspense.

The play then moves back in time. The setting is mostly a bar in Reading, Pa., where workers at a local steel-tubing factory — by this point, one of the few functioning local industries, it’s implied — regularly gather, to celebrate or just ease the burden of another long shift on the factory floor. (To research the play, Ms. Nottage and Ms. Whoriskey interviewed inhabitants of the city, which was cited as the most economically depressed in the country in 2011.)

Tonight, Jason’s mother, Tracey (Johanna Day), is celebrating her birthday with her co-workers Cynthia (Michelle Wilson), who is Chris’s mother, and Jessie (Miriam Shor, convincingly a mess), who’s not much fun, slumped over the table, dead drunk. The bartender, Stan (a gruffly sympathetic James Colby), who worked at the same plant for 28 years before he was injured on the job, joins in the party. Grim gossip going around concerns an acquaintance who snapped when his wife left, feared he’d lose his job, and tried to burn his house down.

Tracey jokingly asks the bar-back and general handyman, the younger Oscar (Carlo Albán), if he might know a fellow Puerto Rican she could hire to burn her house down, should the urge arise. “Well, I’m Colombian,” Oscar replies, with just a hint of offense, “and I don’t know.” (Mr. Albán gives a tender, sensitive performance in this comparatively quiet role.)

The more serious subject is the murky news about changes at the plant where Chris and Jason — who we soon learn are close friends — also work. Stan recalls that another local plant shut down with little warning. “You could wake up tomorrow, and all your jobs are in Mexico, wherever,” he says. (Although they are all drawn with nuance, Stan, and a few others, can be sententious: “They squeeze us like a sponge, drain every last drop of blood out and then throw us away.”)

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

The graveyard of world empires — Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Mayan, Khmer, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian — followed the same trajectory of moral and physical collapse. Those who rule at the end of empire are psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants, the equivalents of the depraved Roman emperors Caligula, Nero, Tiberius and Commodus.

The ecosystem that sustains the empire is degraded and exhausted. Economic growth, concentrated in the hands of corrupt elites, is dependent on a crippling debt peonage imposed on the population. The bloated ruling class of oligarchs, priests, courtiers, mandarins, eunuchs, professional warriors, financial speculators and corporate managers sucks the marrow out of society.

The elites’ myopic response to the looming collapse of the natural world and the civilization is to make subservient populations work harder for less, squander capital in grandiose projects such as pyramids, palaces, border walls and fracking, and wage war. President Trump’s decision to increase military spending by $54 billion and take the needed funds out of the flesh of domestic programs typifies the behavior of terminally ill civilizations. When the Roman Empire fell, it was trying to sustain an army of half a million soldiers that had become a parasitic drain on state resources.

The complex bureaucratic mechanisms that are created by all civilizations ultimately doom them. The difference now, as Joseph Tainter points out in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” is that “collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole.”

Civilizations in decline, despite the palpable signs of decay around them, remain fixated on restoring their “greatness.” Their illusions condemn them. They cannot see that the forces that gave rise to modern civilization, namely technology, industrial violence and fossil fuels, are the same forces that are extinguishing it. Their leaders are trained only to serve the system, slavishly worshipping the old gods long after these gods begin to demand millions of sacrificial victims.

Reading the Vault 7: documents I see Linux is not secure. But I did not think it ever was. My contention is that when they are out to make your flash memory vanish or ruin your hard drive. Windows does it better! A bit finer control. Yet upon reflection I was losing hard drives under both systems when I was under heavy attack. Three in a couple of months. Cylindrical read errors on all of them. All that from sniffing around and watching them work the net. The thing is, rigging my Windows machine so it would turn on when I walked into the room was really creepy. It took a while to figure out how they were doing that. Windows can also eat USB devices very effectively. That gets expensive fast, but not as fast as hard drives do. They made me their bitch both ways, but Windows was the creepshow.

It saddens me that most Americans are apathetic about being spied on and manipulated. They are complacent and comfortable allowing this evil to flourish so long as they do not become a victim of it.

If nature had not sown evils enough in life, we are continually adding grief to grief and aggravating the common calamity by our cruel treatment of one another. - Joseph Addison

If humanity does not opt for integrity we are through completely. It is absolutely touch and go. Each one of us could make the difference. - Buckminster Fuller

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. -- Harold Pinter

_____________

From my pal Coyote Prime, we find the latest insights on the current American nightmare from Kunstlerville. Almost reminds you of the end of the Vietnam catastrophe, doesn't it? (But where are the helicopters? Other than at Trump's places.)

“Let’s take a breather from more consequential money matters at hand midweek to consider the tending moods of our time and place. It is clear by now that we have four corners of American politics these days: the utterly lost and delusional Democratic party; the feckless Republicans; the permanent Deep State of bureaucratic foot-soldiers and errand boys; and Trump, the Golem-King of the Coming Greatness. Wherefore, and what the f**k, you might ask.

The Democrats reduced themselves to a gang of sadistic neo-Maoists seeking to eradicate anything that resembles free expression across the land in the name of social justice. Coercion has been their coin of the realm, and especially in the realm of ideas where “diversity” means stepping on your opponent’s neck until he pretends to agree with your Newspeak brand of grad school neologisms, and “inclusion” means welcome if you’re just like us. I say Maoists because just like Mao’s “Red Guard” of rampaging students in 1966, their mission is to “correct” the thinking of those who might dare to oppose the established leader. Only in this case, that established leader happened to lose the sure-thing election and the party finds itself unbelievably out-of-power and suddenly purposeless, like a termite mound without a queen, the workers and soldiers fleeing the power center in an hysteria of lost identity.

They regrouped briefly after the election debacle to fight an imaginary adversary, Russia, the phantom ghost-bear, who supposedly stepped on their termite mound and killed the queen, but, strangely, no actual evidence was ever found of the ghost-bear’s paw-print. And ever since that fact was starkly revealed by former NSA chief James Clapper on NBC’s "Meet the Press," the Russia hallucination has vanished from page one of the party’s media outlets — though, in an interesting last gasp of striving correctitude, Monday’s "New York Times" features a front page story detailing Georgetown University’s hateful traffic in the slave trade two centuries ago. That should suffice to shut the wicked place down for once and for all!

The Republican Party, to avoid going full-Whig and sliding down the laundry chute of history, made a bad deal for a new figurehead who is liable to make the party look way worse than it could ever accomplish on its own. This golden boy has dragged the party poobahs to the put-up-or-shut-up room of our nation’s capital - the place that Senator Rand Paul was searching high and low for last week - where they are charged with reforming the country’s health care racket.

It looks for now like they will cook up a toxic farrago of new giveaways to their patrons in the hospital cartel, the insurance companies, and pharma. The voting public already detects the odor of 30-day-old carp in the first tastings of the dish. There’s a fair chance that the recipe will end up getting tossed in the Capitol dumpster, and that in itself could finish the party because there’s little question that the current system known as ObamaCare or the Affordable Care Act (not) is something like a fatal tumor in the nation’s craw. If the effort to fix that fails, the Republicans complete their transformation from the Party of No to the Party of Just Go.

The Deep State seems eager to sever its connections to both putrifying parties and attempt to run the groaning colossus of government ad hoc if necessary. The military and intel chains of command remain intact, along with their “assets,” and one can easily imagine anxious meetings of scenario-running in the back rooms of the Pentagon and the Langley frat house. What if…? “What if we just smoke the dude?” an old Agency warrior remarks offhand, and the roomful of colleagues pause in their cogitations to weigh the notion. Some of them nod and make a moue (Moue, noun: a pouting expression used to convey annoyance or distaste - CP) and others just cough into their sleeves. One young striver in the back mentions “a little something” they’ve been working on that involves hairspray and a neurotoxin derived from the Gaboon viper…

And then there is our President himself: Donald J. Trump, in the awesome solitude of his Twitterverse dome. A strange destiny brought him to his place in history thus far, and many of us surveying the scene lo these many months kind of get it: the festering disgust with the other three corners of American power; the dismal fall of the middle class into a purgatory of repossession, idleness, opiates, and tattoos; the accelerating purposelessness of the dwindling consumer economy; the matrix of racketeering that systematically drains everyone’s financial mojo while adding humiliation to the shoddy service it delivers; the pointless, costly wars in faraway places and their conversion into permanent sewers; the disgraceful disfigurement of a once grand national landscape into a wilderness of dying malls and freeway ramps.

So, onto the scene strides The Donald, a giant among the squalling midgets of our time, with his promise to bigly re-greatify this suffering land. I suppose he means well in his torturous way. So did a lot of other figures in history who found themselves at the top: Idi Amin, Uncle Joe Stalin, Vlad the Impaler, King Leopold of Belgium, Adolf You-Know-Who, Pol Pot. The list of the well-meaning is very long.”

____________

They will blame James Comey and the FBI. They will blame voter suppression and racism. They will blame Bernie or bust and misogyny. They will blame third parties and independent candidates. They will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social media for being a bullhorn, and WikiLeaks for airing the laundry.

But this leaves out the force most responsible for creating the nightmare in which we now find ourselves wide awake: neoliberalism. That worldview – fully embodied by Hillary Clinton and her machine – is no match for Trump-style extremism. The decision to run one against the other is what sealed our fate. If we learn nothing else, can we please learn from that mistake?

Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than their precarious present.

At the same time, they have witnessed the rise of the Davos class, a hyper-connected network of banking and tech billionaires, elected leaders who are awfully cosy with those interests, and Hollywood celebrities who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous. Success is a party to which they were not invited, and they know in their hearts that this rising wealth and power is somehow directly connected to their growing debts and powerlessness.

For the people who saw security and status as their birthright – and that means white men most of all – these losses are unbearable.

Donald Trump speaks directly to that pain. The Brexit campaign spoke to that pain. So do all of the rising far-right parties in Europe. They answer it with nostalgic nationalism and anger at remote economic bureaucracies – whether Washington, the North American free trade agreement the World Trade Organisation or the EU. And of course, they answer it by bashing immigrants and people of colour, vilifying Muslims, and degrading women. Elite neoliberalism has nothing to offer that pain, because neoliberalism unleashed the Davos class. People such as Hillary and Bill Clinton are the toast of the Davos party. In truth, they threw the party.

Trump’s message was: “All is hell.” Clinton answered: “All is well.” But it’s not well – far from it.

Neo-fascist responses to rampant insecurity and inequality are not going to go away. But what we know from the 1930s is that what it takes to do battle with fascism is a real left. A good chunk of Trump’s support could be peeled away if there were a genuine redistributive agenda on the table. An agenda to take on the billionaire class with more than rhetoric, and use the money for a green new deal. Such a plan could create a tidal wave of well-paying unionised jobs, bring badly needed resources and opportunities to communities of colour, and insist that polluters should pay for workers to be retrained and fully included in this future.

It could fashion policies that fight institutionalised racism, economic inequality and climate change at the same time. It could take on bad trade deals and police violence, and honour indigenous people as the original protectors of the land, water and air.

People have a right to be angry, and a powerful, intersectional left agenda can direct that anger where it belongs, while fighting for holistic solutions that will bring a frayed society together.

Such a coalition is possible. In Canada, we have begun to cobble it together under the banner of a people’s agenda called The Leap Manifesto, endorsed by more than 220 organisations from Greenpeace Canada to "Black Lives Matter" Toronto, and some of our largest trade unions.

____________

Ready to go to war?

For Russia?

Surely they are just kidding us.

Again.

And you thought their long-term planning skills were nonexistent.

According to their main man, senior General Wesley Clark, in his 2007 speech about seven wars in five years, they are right on schedule. (Okay, maybe a little bit late - but they had to run an election, so it held them up some.)

Even when they have to ride the wrong horse.

Funny how easily those horses change color.

In the above video, General Wesley Clark one of the most highly decorated 4 star generals of the US military openly admits that there has been ‘a policy coup’ in the US government. He explains that he was told, back in 1991, that the US would actively invade and destabilise countries across the Middle East to take control of the region. These are not the words of an outsider conspiracy theorist, but the man who did this job for the US government. . . .

Russia’s “hack” of the 2016 US elections could be “considered an act of war,” says former Vice President and noted warhawk Dick Cheney, speaking at an event in New Delhi, India. He joins the chorus of US notables resorting to the groundless accusation.

"In some quarters, that would be considered an act of war. I think it’s a kind of conduct and activity we will see going forward," said Cheney, the neocon’s neocon. "There’s no question" that the Russian government tried to "interfere" with the US elections, Cheney added.

Despite his seemingly sadistic love of watching the US go to war, Cheney himself deferred being drafted by the US military five times during the Vietnam era.

Democrats have been equally quick to launch the "Russian hacking" attack for their own political gain. Rep. Jackie Speier of California said so-called Russian meddling "was an act of war, an act of hybrid warfare," according to a report by the "Independent Journal Review".

A letter written by dozens of former intelligence, diplomatic, and military officials addressed to President Barack Obama concluded that "DNC and HRC servers alleged to have been hacked were, in fact, not hacked."

For one, the FBI never accessed the compromised servers at the DNC, Sputnik reported.

Bill Binney, a 35-year NSA veteran and former technical director at the spy agency, said the publication of Hillary Clinton and John Podesta’s emails were the result of an insider leak rather than an external attack.

I keep wondering why no one has explained the definition of a "hack" to any of these hackers.

The Confederacy - and the slavery that spawned it - was also one big con job on the Southern, white, working class. A con job funded by some of the ante-bellum one-per-centers, that continues today in a similar form. You don’t have to be an economist to see that forcing blacks - a third of the South’s laborers - to work without pay drove down wages for everyone else. And not just in agriculture. A quarter of enslaved blacks worked in the construction, manufacturing and lumbering trades; cutting wages even for skilled white workers.

Thanks to the profitability of this no-wage/low-wage combination, a majority of American one-per-centers were southerners. Slavery made southern states the richest in the country. The South was richer than any other country except England. But that vast wealth was invisible outside the plantation ballrooms. With low wages and few schools, southern whites suffered a much lower land ownership rate and a far lower literacy rate than northern whites.

...[M]ost Southerners didn’t own slaves. But they were persuaded to risk their lives and limbs for the right of a few to get rich as Croesus from slavery. For their sacrifices and their votes, they earned two things before and after the Civil War. First, a very skinny slice of the immense Southern pie. And second, the thing that made those slim rations palatable then and now: the shallow satisfaction of knowing that blacks had no slice at all.

How did the plantation owners mislead so many Southern whites?

They managed this con job partly with a propaganda technique that will be familiar to modern Americans, but hasn’t received the coverage it deserves in our sesquicentennial celebrations. Starting in the 1840s, wealthy Southerners supported more than 30 regional pro-slavery magazines, many pamphlets, newspapers and novels that falsely touted slave ownership as having benefits that would - in today’s lingo - trickle down to benefit non-slave owning whites and even blacks. The flip side of the coin of this old-is-new trickle-down propaganda is the mistaken notion that any gain by blacks in wages, schools or health care comes at the expense of the white working class.

Today’s version of this con job no longer supports slavery, but still works in the South and thrives in pro trickle-down think tanks, magazines, newspapers, talk radio and TV news shows such as the Cato Foundation, "Reason" magazine, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. These sources are underwritten by pro trickle-down one-per-centers like the Koch brothers (who didn't support Trump - Hillary was their preferred candidate) and Rupert Murdoch.

For example, a map of states that didn’t expand Medicaid - which would actually be a boon mostly to poor whites - resembles a map of the old Confederacy with a few other poor, rural states thrown in. Another indication that this divisive propaganda works on Southern whites came in 2012. Romney and Obama evenly split the white working class in the West, Midwest and Northeast. But in the South we went 2-1 for Romney.

Lowering the flag because of the harm done to blacks is the right thing to do. We also need to lower it because it symbolizes material harm the ideology of the Confederacy did to Southern whites that lasts even to this day.

One can love the South without flying the battle flag. But it won’t help to get rid of an old symbol if we can’t also rid ourselves of the self-destructive beliefs that go with it. Only by shedding those too, will Southern whites finally catch up to the rest of the country in wages, health and education.

There's been lots of progress in Virginia, some in Florida, some in Texas. And the Deep South? That's another signal Georgia voters in the Fulton, Cobb and DeKalb county 'burbs north of Atlanta may soon be sending the rest of the country when they turn out on April 18 and June 20 for Jon Ossoff. Replacing Mick Mulvaney in South Carolina (May 2 for the primaries and also June 20 for the runoff) with a non-Confederate will be a lot harder.

The Republicans are likely to run a backward-facing state Rep., Tommy Pope, and the DCCC is pimping for some Goldman Sachs guy, Archie Parnell.

As usual.

The best reason why a big (extremely large) broom is needed for sweeping out the reigning Dem oligopoly.

After which, a huuuge dose of DDT (which the right wingers are now touting as incorrectly targeted by Rachel Carson - "Thanks! Charles and David.") to air the place out.
____________

It’s the militarized police, which have joined forces with state and federal law enforcement agencies in order to establish themselves as a standing army. It’s the fusion centers and spy agencies that have created a surveillance state and turned all of us into suspects.

It’s the courthouses and prisons that have allowed corporate profits to take precedence over due process and justice. It’s the military empire with its private contractors and defense industry that is bankrupting the nation. It’s the private sector with its 854,000 contract personnel with top-secret clearances, “a number greater than that of top-secret-cleared civilian employees of the government.”

It’s what former congressional staffer Mike Lofgren refers to as “a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies”: the Department of Defense, the State Department, Homeland Security, the CIA, the Justice Department, the Treasury, the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a handful of vital federal trial courts, and members of the defense and intelligence committees.

It’s every facet of a government that is no longer friendly to freedom and is working overtime to trample the Constitution underfoot and render the citizenry powerless in the face of the government’s power grabs, corruption and abusive tactics.

These are the key players that drive the shadow government.

Lofgren, mentioned above, wrote a book titled, The Deep State, and says of the Deep State:

It is the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism and the militarization of foreign policy, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social structure that has given us the most unequal society in almost a century, and the political dysfunction that has paralyzed day-to-day governance.

That Deep State operatives would use the propaganda media to tell you at this point in history that the Deep State does not exist tells that this new scrutiny is unwelcome.

The Deep State is the spying apparatus that scarfs up data on everyone all around the world and meddles in supposed free and fair elections and overthrows regimes for its own purposes. It is the regulatory bureaucracy that writes laws and regulations on such a scope that every American commits multiple felonies through the normal course of a day so that the state can expropriate their land and their wealth.

It is the police state that enforces these and other regulations and laws passed legally and illegally and extraconstitutionally, and which steals the people’s liberty and livelihood through asset forfeiture (a practice just upheld by the Supreme Court).

It is the CFR which puts up presidential candidates in both parties and populates the government in the departments of State, Treasury and Defense regardless of the party of the president, and establishes policy which is rubber-stamped by the elected class. It is the military-industrial complex which recognizes no international borders and makes war on nations that have not attacked us and pose us no harm beyond idle threats.

It is the banksters who create money out of thin air to pay for the wars and use it to rape and pillage the resources of foreign countries as readily as America. It is the house of Rothschild and the house of Rockefeller and globalist elites who annually meet for Bilderberg.

It is the Federal Reserve — which is not federal (it is a private bank) and does not hold reserves – which prints money that is then used (often by being passed through extra-governmental agencies like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, etc.) by corporate jackals and hit men who bribe and, if necessary, threaten leaders of other nations into accepting deals to build or rebuild their countries’ infrastructure for the benefit of powerful multinational corporations.

This saddles those countries with burdensome debt and locks their populations into permanent poverty and deprivation. Those leaders who do not play along are assassinated or their countries invaded by U.S. troops under some created, high-minded justification.

The Fed produces nothing but more paper money, and it takes from the producers. Therefore, its only solution for the collapsing financial system is to steal wealth from the producers of goods and services through taxation and provide more and more fiat money and credit.

A fiat paper money regime always becomes autocratic or fascist toward the last days of its existence. This is the time when the state makes war on its own people. Most never know it because it is not announced, but hidden in propaganda within such terms as “for the common good.”

An unlimited supply of paper money buys sophisticated arms that create fear and the propaganda to manipulate the people against their personal freedom and best interest. Fiat paper money is tyranny or becomes tyranny. It guarantees criminal government.

Paper money, personal freedom and privacy are incompatible. Paper money centralizes power to the state and diminishes the individual. This is the first cause of all you see happening.

The Deep State retains its hold on power by creating chaos and causing destruction. Chaos around the globe is growing more rampant thanks to beating of war drums by the warmongering “D” people and the war-loving neocon false conservative “R” people and the machinations of the Deep State.

I would not be at all surprised to soon see the Deep State create or instigate a false flag event and blame it on Russia or North Korea or China or Iran. It could be a terror event, or an attack or even an “accidental” collision between a U.S. military plane or ship and one from Russia or China. Or, it could be a collapse of the electrical grid or the banking system.

Whatever the case, it is almost too late for preparedness. You should have cash (enough to cover a month of bills, if possible), gold and/or silver, guns and ammunition and stored food and water – enough to last at least 30 days in a crisis. More is better.

I believe a crisis event looms.

Another one?

Max and Stacy come to the rescue.

[KR1050] Keiser Report: ‘The New Detroit

We discuss the cheap wages and crushed limbs of Alabama’s auto manufacturing boom. In the second half, Max interviews Professor John Mill Ackerman in Mexico City about what the NAFTA renegotiations might mean for Mexico and world trade and whether or not Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador could win the next elections with his anti-neoliberal economic message.

[KR1048] Keiser Report: Heading for Global War

We discuss the racket that is war. In the second half, Max talks to JP Sottile of NewsVandal.com about trumping Trump and howling at the Moonves: how corporate media raked in the big bucks pushing a reality tv star as president.

[KR1049] Keiser Report: Trail of ‘American carnage’

We discuss the trail of ‘American carnage’ and how it led to a Trump presidency. In the second half, we discuss the OxyCartel pushing millions of prescription pills on small towns across the USA.

Certainly some very hard choices coming up.

Lee Camp talks about how the mainstream media is tainted by corporate power, given the fact six companies control the bulk of what we watch and hear daily. Lee also reveals how Walmart and Lowes’ use of slave labor is getting swept under the rug by media companies that play their ads on repeat.

In the second half, correspondent John F. O’Donnell delves into the Dumpster fire that is Trump’s 2018 budget proposal and how it will scorch social services that provide basic needs for Americans. Finally, correspondent Naomi Karavani reveals the attempt by tax giants like H&R Block and Intuit to block access to services that allow Americans to file their taxes for free.

Lee Camp uses details from the CIA leaks to to tell us what remains of our privacy in the surveillance state. As technology advances we will have to be more vigilant of our rights in the weirdest ways ever imaginable. Then Lee reveals the more egregious parts of Trumpcare that no one is talking about. Why exactly are 20 million at risk of losing coverage?

Correspondent Naomi Karavani reveals new developments in climate change science that are being ignored by weather reporters, despite extreme weather that’s destroying people’s lives. Finally, correspondent Natalie McGill delves into the most important federal civil rights case since Brown v. Board of Ed in 1954. Historically Black Colleges and Universities are losing funding, as state university systems are overlooking their importance.

This refugee crisis is an American creation, a parting gift from George W. Bush. We forget what he was, we forget the aftermath of what he did, but how? Whence comes this shallow grave of memory? The corporate "news" media, for their part, are all too happy to help us forget, because in that forgetting they are absolved of any culpability for their harrowing judgment and insatiable desire for ratings. The politicians are thrilled we forget because they want to do it all over again, because that's where the money is. In the end, however, we forget because we choose to, because horror is hard to hold in the heart for so long, because all this is our shame, too, and that is a grueling fact to face.

. . . Let's start with the book. It is a collection of some 66 Bush-painted portraits of the faces of men and women who got blown apart one way or another in Iraq and Afghanistan. The portraits of those maimed in Iraq specifically depict soldiers in muted agony delivered to their current damaged estate by the artist formerly known as George, who threw them into that meat grinder for money on a raft of obvious lies. If one had a soul, the act of painting the faces of your victims would seem like a fate worse than death, a sorrowful tour of self-loathing and regret as your brush rounded out the features of those laid low by your faithless greed. But no, there was Bush on the television, smiling and smiling with the book in his lap, utterly oblivious to the ghastly irony of his endeavor.

It should come as no surprise, really. Here is the man who responded to the attacks of September 11 by demanding tax cuts, whose idea of humor was to make a satire video of himself searching for the missing weapons of mass destruction in the Oval Office. The soldiers Bush painted could very well have been getting blasted legless and eyeless out of their armored vehicles at the exact same time he was stooping to look under his desk, then under a table - nope, not here either.

That is the George W. Bush I remember, the Bush I will never, ever forget, the feckless, lethal liar, the thief, the mass murderer, the fool, the fraud, the bumbler, the man with no shame. How appallingly easy it is, apparently, for people to forget.

Our national knack for forgetting is not solely relegated to this polished reimagining of Bush. We are currently engaged in a great national debate over the fate of tens of thousands of Middle Eastern and African refugees seeking safety here in the United States. If politicians like Donald Trump have their way, those refugees would be told in no uncertain terms that, sorry, there's no room at the inn. We just can't have you here because you might be "terrorists," even though we vigorously screen you. See, there's this thing called the "GOP base," and they hate you because they've been well-trained to do so, and they vote. The country's current leadership needs to keep them happy, and so you are barred at the door.

In this development lies one of the greatest moral calamities the United States has ever committed, another example of highly convenient national memory loss. To a very large degree, we created those refugees. We've been bombing Iraq with dreary regularity for 26 years and counting, bombing people's homes, their markets, their electrical grids, their mosques, their water and sewage treatment plants, their roads and bridges, and when we ran out of things to bomb, we bombed the rubble because it looks good on TV. Sooner or later, after everything you've ever known or called home has been laid waste, you're going to grab what's left of your family and run for your lives.

And run people did, millions of them, away from the American war and over the border into Syria, which was subsumed by the mass migration of these desperate victims. Syria trembled under the burden and then collapsed into the chaos we are currently witnessing after a vicious civil war broke out, and once again, millions of people were on the run. Many ran all the way to Europe, where they await the adjudication of their fate, and many now seek asylum in the United States, where they have family and a chance at a new life. Because we forget, they are now forgotten, and the suffering we have already visited upon them is once more compounded. It takes a special kind of monster to do such a thing to innocent people. We do it every day, and then forget it ever happened.

This hellish footrace has been taking place all across the Middle East for a long while now, predominately in nations where the US has intervened militarily, most recently and vividly in Yemen. Saudi Arabia, a staunch US ally, has been using US-made weapons to terrible effect in that nation, which is approaching Aleppo levels of carnage and devastation at speed. Perhaps the cruelest twist to all this is the insinuation, pushed by Trump whenever possible, that the ranks of these refugees will be riddled with terrorists. When all you know is annihilated, you have two simple choices: Take up arms against your aggressors, or run. These people chose to run, and even that most elemental act of ultimate surrender is not enough to evoke the slightest hint of mercy from us, the ones who put them to their heels in the first place.

. . . About 2,600 US paratroopers from Ft. Bragg are preparing to deploy to Kuwait, Iraq and Syria, where they will join the fight against ISIS. They will meet some 400 Marines already in Syria, who are tasked with keeping our so-called allies in the region from attacking each other. They have, as yet, no orders to join the fray directly, save for the Marines who are firing artillery salvos at today's enemies. Many of these troops have been deployed more than five times already. Those who serve over there have come to call it the "Forever War."

I wonder how long it will be before we forget them, too.

We, the people, the United States of Forgetting people? Or at least forgetful people.

The Deep State is an outgrowth of the illiberal tendencies in liberal democracy, tendencies which have given disproportionate influence to a militarized foreign policy, secrecy and surveillance at home and entrenched disparities of wealth. But, while it has been a grave defect of our governmental system, it was not the worst thinkable permutation of that system. What is now evolving in the West Wing under the troika of Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner is something much more sinister.

. . . There is little evidence that America will be saved by concealed and powerful forces in the manner of the shadowy Caped Crusader rescuing Gotham City from the deranged Joker, or, alternatively, that the rough-hewn populist good guy Trump is in mortal combat with the Deep State. It is true that he ran as a populist against elite institutions: the power centers of the 1 percent - Wall Street, Silicon Valley and the military-industrial complex - mostly supported his opponent. But his actions so far have strongly reinforced rather than weakened their position.

A glance at the membership of the president's Strategic and Policy Forum shows they are flocking to his side, with masters of financial buccaneering like Stephen Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group and Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, along with Doug McMillon of retail giant Walmart. There is even an ex-governor of the Federal Reserve Board, Bush appointee Kevin Warsh. This is hardly a populist revolution of the kind preached by John Steinbeck's Tom Joad.

Trump's senior government appointments reinforce this impression: his Cabinet, filled with moguls from Big Oil, mega-banking, investment and retail, makes George W. Bush's Cabinet look like a Bolshevik workers' council. Even Steve Bannon, Trump's "alt-right" Svengali, is an alumnus of Goldman Sachs, whose stock has surged 38 percent since the election. The fact that America's premier corporate raider, Carl Icahn, will be special adviser on regulatory reform, and that Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was a Goldman executive for 16 years, does not inspire confidence that economic management will be different from that which piloted us into the 2008 crash.

Despite their windfall from Trump's tax policies, the rich will only be able to consume so many filet mignons, Sub-Zero refrigerators and Patek-Philippe watches before reaching satiation. The rest of their tax cut dividend will go into lifting the equities market to stratospheric levels or building palatial monuments in Glen Cove, Palm Beach or Palo Alto. Since the tax cuts will be much greater than Bush's own prodigious fiscal mismanagement, the potential equities and real estate bubble could be a thing to behold. This is anything but a populist economic policy.

Candidate Trump's criticism of the invasion of Iraq and promise of better relations with Russia also appealed to the growing populist backlash against the foreign policy elite's practice of military intervention. He was regarded as less hawkish than his opponent, Hillary Clinton, which led some to regard him as the default peace candidate of the two major-party nominees. One peace activist and former Democrat even said in correspondence to me that "[f]or my grandchildren, Trump's my only realistic hope." This premise was spectacularly mistaken and ignored what lay in plain sight.

Trump had always claimed, in line with conventional Republican dogma, that America's military was "depleted," and that he would increase its budget to "rebuild" it. No matter that this was a myth, as DOD in 2016 spent, in constant dollars, comfortably more than the Cold War average. And, sure enough, after the election defense stocks rose in the expectation that he would open the money spigot even wider. This expectation is bolstered by the fact that Congress is controlled by Republicans, whose reflex is to throw money at defense. The military-industrial complex, a core component of the Deep State, will grow even fatter, as his request for a 10-percent Pentagon budget increase plainly telegraphs.

Donald Trump will not dismantle the extra-constitutional power structures that have grown more influential in the last decades of near-perpetual war, increasingly intrusive surveillance, financial deregulation and widening inequality. He will further entrench them. This has confounded those in the media, who once regarded him as a vulgar but basically harmless jackass who probably wouldn't win but who in any case increased ratings and circulation, as well as those Americans desperate for silver linings who saw him a change agent that would shake up a polarized political system and slaughter a few sacred cows.

The powers-that-be probably never liked Trump's vulgarity, but they had in any case a hedged bet during the campaign: Hillary Clinton, a firm friend of Wall Street, was denounced as such by an opponent who was an even bigger friend of the Street. It was a no-lose proposition.

In the post-2008 age of populism the elites have flexibly adapted to the angry rhetoric of anti-establishment politics while expanding the very same policies that led to that populism in the first place. Trump's tastelessness and complete lack of qualifications, which at first seemed like serious defects, may in retrospect have been his tactic to save their political agenda by masking it in a façade of fake populism and reality-TV stage management.

Now you see much more clearly how George W. gets to return to the national stage a hero.

Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert, still down on my farm, would never think of making the logical argument for Medicare for All.

Except for now because no one else with a TV economics show will.

Max & Stacy are also not afraid to explain why Neoliberalism is obviously junk economics:

And as to space junk or Swede danger . . .

My personal hero, Lee Camp, in the following episodes of "Redacted Tonight,"

exposes who (what) is really behind the heinous Trump presidency. He reveals the shady power players who are really calling the shots. It’s a disgusting web of bad operators, and it’s definitely worth knowing about. Lee also covers the new Wikileaks CIA leaks. These leaks show that the CIA has been spying on us through, not only our phones, but also our TVs and cars. This gross violation is truly disturbing. Lee breaks it all down.

In the second half of the show, "Redacted" correspondent Natalie McGill joins Lee at the desk to discuss Robo-Bees. Yes, ROBOTIC BEES! Because of colony collapse and climate change, lots of organic bees are dying. Robo-Bees are being used to pick up the pollinating slack. Is this a great innovation or completely horrible? Finally, correspondent Naomi Karavani files a report about hate crime legislation around the country. It turns out the handful of states that don’t have strong hate crime laws HAVE MORE HATE CRIMES. Karavani explains this and more on "Redacted Tonight."

And you thought it was okay to ignore the news on the MSM about how the economics measures were changed by those who, of course, only had your best interests at heart.

Again and again.

And who benefits from the very lucrative plan behind the changes?

According to official US economic data, the US Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has expanded for 22 quarters, raising real GDP 12.1% above its high prior to the 2008-09 economic contraction. Yet, US manufacturing output and US industrial production have not recovered to their pre-contraction high.

So what is driving the real GDP growth? In my opinion, the rise in real GDP is an illusion produced by the under-measurement of inflation.

As I have reported on many occasions, John Williams of shadowstats.com has concluded that changes in the way that the government approaches the measurement of inflation has, in effect, defined inflation away.

Formerly, if a price of an item in an inflation measure rose, the inflation rate would rise by the price times the weight of the item in the index. Today, if a price of an item in an inflation measure rises, that item is removed from the index, and a lower cost item substituted in its place.

A second way that government has contrived in order to undermeasure inflation is to declare price rises “quality improvements” and not count the higher price as inflation.

Using these methods, an 8% rate of inflation can, for example, be reduced to a 2% inflation rate.

The low inflation rate is what produces the appearance of real GDP growth. As GDP is measured in prevailing prices, in order to know whether the GDP number is the result of an increase in the output of goods and services or merely the result of higher prices or inflation, the nominal GDP figure is deflated by the inflation measure.

For example, if nominal GDP rises 5% this year over last year, and the inflation rate is measured at 2%, real GDP has grown by 3%. However, if the 2% inflation rate is the contrived result described above, and inflation is really 5% or 8%, GDP growth was zero or declined by 3%.

The main reason that the government revamped its measurement of inflation is to save money by denying Social Security recipients cost-of-living-adjustments. During the many years that retirees have had no interest income on their retirement savings due to the Federal Reserve’s low interest rate policy in support of the balance sheets of the “banks too big to fail,” retirees have also been denied cost-of-living adjustments to their Social Security pensions.

In his latest report John Williams states:

“Decades of massaged reporting methodologies have distanced headline economic activity from common experience and underlying reality. When I started the Shadow Government Statistics newsletter in 2004, it reflected my formal experiences of assessing the quality and nature of headline economic reporting since the early 1980s, and of a broad recognition that Main Street U.S.A. had a good sense of underlying economic reality.“By 2004, underlying economic reality clearly was not reflected in the headline numbers issued by most statistical agencies of the federal government. Headline business conditions broadly were overstated, while inflation was understated. A heavily-positive public response accompanied the ShadowStats.com introduction, broadly confirming that common experience was not reflected meaningfully in the government’s headline data. Reporting quality and related circumstances have deteriorated since.”

To speak frankly, the picture of the economy that is presented to the public is a virtual reality contrived to take the place of the real reality. The economic recovery, the low inflation and unemployment rates are no more real than Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, Assad’s use of chemical weapons, Iranian nukes, and Russian invasion of Ukraine. As in the movie, "The Matrix" in which Americans live is the product of government’s ability to control the explanations.

As John Williams says, the government’s “GDP reporting is not close to being credible.” The Federal Reserve’s Industrial Production Index represents 61% of GDP and remains below its peak prior to the 2008-09 economic contraction. Yet the government says real GDP is 12.1% higher.

Try finding any discussion of this inconsistency in the financial media.

There have always been biases in the media, but the 21st century has seen the rise of fake news in order to advance agendas. For example, the neoconservative agenda of overthrowing seven countries in the Middle East in five years was served by the fake news about Saddam Hussein, Gadaffi, Assad, and Iran.

The military/security complex’s agenda of a New Cold War was served by the fake news of Russian invasion and threat to Europe.

President Trump’s intention of restoring normal relations with Russia was defeated by fake news of Russian interference in the presidential election and Trump’s alleged connections to Russian intelligence.

Practically the entire US population belived the obvious, transparent lies about Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Iran and perhaps most still do. Various polls show that a majority of Americans believe the obvious lies about the Russians, and many Amerians want Trump impeached for his non-existent “Russian connections.”

The print and TV media and much of the Internet media create the virtual reality that supports the agendas of the ruling elites, depriving the people of comprehension of factual reality. Websites, such as this one, which endeavor to provide truthful explanations, are dismissed as Russian dupes/agents, conspiracy theorists, kooks, and so forth.

Democracy cannot function when lies crowd out truth in the service of hidden agendas. Neither can life on earth. As terrible as the two 20th century World Wars were in the expenditure of life and destruction of cities, the weapons were puny compared to the thermo-nuclear weapons of today.

According to reports, just one Russian Satan II nuclear missile has sufficient destructive force to obliterate France or the state of Texas.

Russia, surrounded by 28 hostile NATO countries egged on by insane neoconservatives and crazed US generals, relies on nuclear weapons to protect its homeland. In recent years, various Russian officials have said that Russia will never again fight a war on its own territory. This should tell us something, but it hasn’t.

If you have a brain, ask yourself what this orchestrated conflict with Russia is about. Putin has said that he wants no conflict, that Russia threatens no one. But the Western presstitutes declare that Russia is a threat, and the generals who Trump has appointed to the highest positions in his new government say that “Russia is the principal threat to the US.” If you believe Putin, you are a Russian dupe or even a traitor. If you believe the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, you have signed up for Armageddon.

People without valid information cannot make valid decisions. No where in the West other than my website and a few others is there any valid information.

My readership with all the reposts and foreign translations is very large compared to, for example, the Washington Post or New York Times, but it is small compared to the totality of the Western media, all of which repeat the same lies. If my readers were organized, and believed Margaret Mead, they would suffice, but they are not organized. They are scattered all over the world.

The neoconservatives are organized. The military/security complex also is organized, and so are the bankers, Wall Street, and global corporations. For the military/security complex, the world is something to put at risk for their enormous “security” budget. For the bankers, Wall Street, and global corporations, the world is there to be plundered. The plunder has been exposed over and over. See for example, John Perkins, "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man," but the plunder continues via world organizations such as the IMF and World Bank, allegedly goody-goody Western institutions to “help the needy countries.”

Seldom in history have the people had a voice. Those who try to give people a voice are portrayed negatively by the ruling elites. Thomas Paine’s "Common Sense" is the founding document of the American Revolution. His book, "Rights of Man," sold 500,000 copies, making it the best-selling book of the 18th century. In Britain his reward was to be charged with sedition by the government and declared an outlaw. In the US, Federalist newspapers in Boston portrayed him as a drunkard and infidel. There is no monument to him in Washington, D.C. As Lewis Lapham has written, “Paine’s plain and forthright speaking is out of tune with our own contemporary political discourse, which for the most part is the gift for saying nothing.” Or for flumuxing you with false news.

The voice here at this website, my voice, provides perspectives that permit escape from the Matrix, but it depends on your support. As March is upon us, so is my quarterly request for your support. So far, we have both kept our word. You have supported the site, and I have continued to ruin my reputation in Washington by writing explanations that are unpopular in the ruling circles.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

The “deep state” is jargon for the semi-hidden army of bureaucrats, officials, retired officials, legislators, contractors and media people who support and defend established government policies.

Those “deep state” officials include the intelligence, law-enforcement and national security officials who worked in President Barack Obama’s administration but who are still working in permanent or temporary positions in the White House and in surrounding agencies. Many of those officials are believed to be leaking information from within the White House to allies in the anti-Trump media, including Kristol.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

To make matters even more personally offensive (and unbelievable), click on the link below:

FLYNN IS ALSO A DOMINO. Okay, this is crucial, pay attention now. Putin has often been criticized for protecting his friends even when these friends are guilty of wrongdoings. Now let me ask you a simple question: would you rather stick your neck out for Trump or for Putin? Exactly. If Trump was a loyal kind of person he could have called Pence and Flynn to the Oval Office, told Flynn to apologize and told Pence to shut up. But he did nothing of the kind. By accepting Flynn’s “resignation” Trump showed that he does not protect those who fight for him. There will definitely be a domino-effect now as everybody who matters has now understood: Trump is weak, the Neocons got him by the balls, and Trump will leave you hanging when the shit hits the fan.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

Former National Security Agency (NSA) spy John Schindler tweeted on Twitter that a senior intelligence community colleague sent him an email stating that the deep state had declared nuclear war on Trump and that “He will die in jail.”

It is possible that this will be the case.

At the end of World War II, the military/security complex decided that the flow of profits and power from war and threats of war were too great to be relinquished to an era of peace. This complex manipulated a weak and inexperienced President Truman into a gratuitous Cold War with the Soviet Union. The lie was created, and accepted by the gullible American people, that International Communism intended world conquest. This lie was transparant, because Stalin had purged and murdered Leon Trotsky and all communists who believed in world revolution. . . .

Academic experts, knowing where their bread was buttered, went along with and contributed to the deceit. By 1961 the overarching power of the military/security complex was apparent to President Eisenhower, a five-star general in charge of the US invasion of German occupied Western Europe during the Second World War. The private power that the military/security complex (Eisenhower called it the military-industrial complex) exercised disturbed Ike so much that in his last address to the American people he said we must guard against its subversion of democracy:

“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.“We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Eisenhower’s warning was to the point. However, it relied on “an alert and knowledgeable citizenry,” which the US does not have. The American population is largely insoucient, and is heading, across the ideological spectrum from left to right, to self-destruction.

The print and TV media, which serve as propagandists for the ruling military/security complex and Wall Street elites, make certain that Americans have nothing but bogus orchestrated information. Every household and person who turns on TV or reads a newspaper is programed to live in a false orchestrated reality that serves the tiny few who comprise the ruling Establishment.

Trump challenged this Establishment without realizing that it is more powerful than a mere President of the United States.

This is what has happened: During Obama’s second term, Russia and its president were demonized by the military/security complex and the neoconservatives using the presstitute media. The demonization has facilitated the ability of the controlled presstitute media, such as the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and the rest, to associate contact with Russia and articles questioning the orchestrated tensions between the US and Russia with suspicious activity, possibly even treason. Trump and his advisors were too inexperienced to realize that the consequence of Flynn’s dismissal was to validate this orchestrated association of the Trump presidency with Russian intelligence.

Now we have the media whores and the political whores asking the question used to blacken President Nixon and to force his resignation: “What did the President know and when did he know it?” Did Trump know that Gen. Flynn spoke to the Russian ambassador weeks before Trump said he did? Did Flynn do the unspeakable — speak to a Russian — because Trump told him to do so?

The purveyors of fake news — the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and the rest of the despicable liars are using irresponsible innuendo to entangle President Trump in a web of treason. Here is the New York Times headline: “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence.” What we are witnessing is a campaign by the deep state using their media whores to set up Trump for impeachment.

Of course, there is no evidence of such contacts, but facts are not part of the campaign to depose Trump.

Trump’s sacking of Flynn is being used as vindication by his opponents of their false charges that the President of the United States is compromised by Russian intelligence. Realizing the mistake, the White House has tried to counter its blunder by saying that Flynn was dismissed because Trump lost confidence in him, not because he did anything illegal or had connections to Russian intelligence. But none of Trump’s opponents are listening. And the CIA keeps feeding fake news to the presstitutes.

From the very beginning I warned that Trump lacked the experience and the knowledge to pick a government that would stand by him and serve his agenda. Trump has now fired the one person on whom he could have counted. The most obvious conclusion is that Trump is dead meat.

The effort of the American people to bring government back under their control via Trump has been defeated by the deep state.

Chris Hedges argument that revolution is the only way that Americans can reclaim their country continues to gain credibility.

I feel obligated to report on a breaking story. ENENews reports that a number of European countries are seeing elevated iodine-131 levels. So, we're looking for a fairly massive release of a short-lived radioactive isotope, of a kind commonly found in nuclear power plants.

Other radioactive isotopes may also have been released, but most radiation detectors are geared for Iodine-131 because it's so common. Iodine-131 has a half-life of 8 days, meaning that most of it will be gone in a month, but other, longer-lived . It can be flushed out of a human body by taking non-radioactive iodine pills. Otherwise it concentrates in the human pituitary gland and can cause nodules or carcinogenic tumors to grow there.

I want to connect a few dots. On February 9 there was an explosion and a fire at a nuclear power plant in Flamanville, in northern France. The plant's operator reported that....

Now, wait a minute. Worldwide, the nuclear power plant's operator perpetually reports that everything is just fine, hunky dory, move along now, nothing to see here, even when there has been a meltdown.

I need to pass on another news report that of the five workers that were injured at the Flamanville explosion, they appeared to be drunk. I leave open the possibility that all five of them were drinking like fishes on the job, these things can happen at nuclear power plants, but I also want to consider the more likely possibility that all five of them were pretty well cooked by gamma rays an hour before a reporter saw them, that they were hospitalized because they were suffering from radiation sickness, that most of their internal energy was going into repairing internal cellular damage, or alternatively that all five of them might have been a few neurons short of a full deck at the time.

_______

Feeling a little wobbly yet?

Er, how about after reading the essay below?

The DeVos/Prince Blackwaters always win?

Money speaks.

Loudly.

Erik Prince — founder of the private military company Blackwater, financial backer of President Donald Trump, brother to the new Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and frequent Breitbart radio guest of White House power broker Stephen Bannon — has been offering his military expertise to support Chinese government objectives and setting up two Blackwater-style training camps in China, according to sources and his own company statements.

“He’s been working very, very hard to get China to buy into a new Blackwater,” said one former associate. “He’s hell bent on reclaiming his position as the world’s preeminent private military provider.”

During an interview on the FOX Business Network’s Mornings with Maria, former Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich said the intelligence community was responsible for leaking information that Trump’s national security advisor, Mike Flynn, had secretly discussed sanctions with Russian officials before the inauguration and argued their goal was to spoil the relationship between the U.S. and Russia.

“What’s at the core of this is an effort by some in the intelligence community to upend any positive relationship between the U.S. and Russia,” Kucinich said.

And in his opinion, there is a big money motive behind it.

“And I tell you there's a marching band and Chowder Society out there. There's gold in them there hills,” he said. “There are people trying to separate the U.S. and Russia so that this military industrial intel axis can cash in.”

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

Exclusive: President Trump’s acceptance of National Security Advisor Flynn’s resignation marks Official Washington’s first big success in neutering Trump and killing hopes for a détente with Russia, reports Robert Parry.

The neocon-dominated U.S. foreign policy establishment won an important victory in forcing the resignation of President Trump’s National Security Advisor Michael Flynn over a flimsy complaint that he had talked to the Russian ambassador during the transition.

The Washington Post, the neoconservatives’ media flagship, led the assault on Flynn, an unorthodox thinker who shared the neocons’ hostility toward Iran but broke with them in seeing no strategic reason to transform Russia into an implacable enemy.

After Flynn’s resignation on Monday evening, the Post gloated over its success in achieving the first major crack in Trump’s resistance to Official Washington’s establishment. The Post cited Flynn’s “potentially illegal contacts” with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, a reference to the Logan Act, a 1799 never-enforced law that forbids private citizens from negotiating with a country in dispute with the U.S. government.

Though no one has ever been prosecuted under the Logan Act, it has been cited in recent decades as an excuse to attack American citizens who disagree with U.S. government policies while traveling abroad and having contacts with foreign leaders.

Often those accusations are aimed at Americans seeking to peacefully resolve disputes when a U.S. president is eager to escalate a conflict, such as President Ronald Reagan’s denunciations of civil rights leader Jesse Jackson for visiting Cuba and House Speaker Jim Wright for exploring ways to end the Contra war in Nicaragua.

In other words, the Logan Act is usually exploited in a McCarthyistic fashion to bait or discredit peace advocates, similarly to how it has now been used to destroy Flynn for daring to look for ways to reduce the dangerous tensions between Washington and Moscow.

But the media-driven attacks on Flynn are particularly curious since he was the National Security Advisor-designate of an incoming administration at the time of the calls and – as such – he would be expected to make contacts with important foreign officials to begin laying the groundwork for relations with the new president.

Whether U.S. sanctions against Russia were mentioned or not, the notion that an elected president or his designees – during a transition – can have no meaningful contact with diplomats whom they may need to deal with in a matter of weeks represents a particularly contentious interpretation of a law that has never been tested in a court of law and may well represent an unconstitutional infringement on free speech and dissent.

An Expanding Hysteria

Indeed, referencing the Logan Act appears to be an excuse to continue – and expand – Official Washington’s hysteria over Russia, which has become the useful villain to blame for every U.S. foreign policy debacle and even Hillary Clinton’s disastrous presidential run.

Flynn’s more egregious offense in this case may have been to mislead Vice President Mike Pence on exactly what was discussed, but Trump’s White House has not seemed previously overly concerned with the precise accuracy of its statements.

Indeed, Trump and his team have tangled themselves up for weeks by promoting “alternative facts” — that Donald Trump’s inaugural crowd was bigger than Barack Obama’s and that Trump would have won the popular vote if not for three million to five million illegal votes. Though these absurd claims pertain more to Trump’s ego than to anything important, he and his representatives have continued fighting these fights on Twitter and TV appearances and show no signs of stopping.

So, the ouster of Flynn for failing to provide a complete readout on some telephone conversations in December stands out as even more significant in the context of the deluge of falsehoods that have poured forth from Trump’s White House.

Flynn’s real “offense” appears to be that he favors détente with Russia rather than escalation of a new and dangerous Cold War. Trump’s idea of a rapprochement with Moscow – and a search for areas of cooperation and compromise – has been driving Official Washington’s foreign policy establishment crazy for months and the neocons, in particular, have been determined to block it.

Though Flynn has pandered to elements of the neocon movement with his own hysterical denunciations of Iran and Islam in general, he emerged as a key architect for Trump’s plans to seek a constructive relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Meanwhile, the neocons and their liberal-interventionist sidekicks have invested heavily in making Putin the all-purpose bête noire to justify a major investment in new military hardware and in pricy propaganda operations.

The neocons and liberal hawks also hated Flynn because – as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency – he oversaw a prescient 2012 analysis that foresaw that their support for the Syrian insurgency would give rise to “a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria."

The DIA report, which was partially declassified in a lawsuit over the 2012 killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other U.S. personnel in Benghazi, Libya, embarrassed the advocates for an escalation of the war in Syria and the ouster of secular President Bashar al-Assad.

Flynn even went further in a 2015 interview when he said the intelligence was “very clear” that the Obama administration made a “willful decision” to back these jihadists in league with Middle East allies, a choice that looked particularly stupid when Islamic State militants started beheading American hostages and capturing cities in Iraq.

A Beloved ‘Regime Change’

But “regime change” in Syria was dear to the neocons’ hearts. After all, Israeli leaders had declared Assad’s removal central to smashing the so-called “Shiite crescent” reaching from Tehran through Damascus to Beirut.

The neocons and liberal hawks had come very close to getting the direct U.S. military intervention that they so wanted to destroy Assad’s army after a mysterious sarin gas attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013.

The Obama administration quickly pinned the atrocity on Assad even though a number of U.S. intelligence analysts suspected a “false flag” attack carried out by jihadists.

Still, despite those doubts, it appeared a bombing campaign against Assad was in the offing, except that Obama delayed its implementation and Putin then proposed an alternative in which Assad would surrender all his chemical weapons.

Putin’s interference in the neocon/liberal-hawk war plans made him the new prime target – and Ukraine became ground zero for the effort to explode the cooperative relationship between Obama and Putin.

On Sept. 26, 2013, only weeks after the aborted U.S. bombing campaign against Syria, Carl Gershman, the neocon president of the U.S.-government-funded National Endowment for Democracy, took to the Post’s op-ed page to declare “Ukraine the biggest prize” and suggest that winning it could ultimately lead to toppling Putin inside Russia.

Key U.S. government neocons, such as Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, Victoria Nuland and Sen. John McCain, then began pushing for the violent right-wing coup that – in February 2014 – ousted Ukraine’s elected President Viktor Yanukovych and touched off the new Cold War with Russia.

Amid these heightened tensions, the mainstream media in the United States and Europe joined in the full-scale Russia/Putin-bashing.

All rational perspective on the underlying reality was lost, except for a handful of independent Internet journalists and foreign-policy outsiders who rejected the over-the-top propaganda.

A Few Dissenters Too Many

But even a few dissenters were a few dissenters too many. So, to enforce the new groupthink – holding Russia at fault for pretty much everything – a new McCarthyism emerged, deeming anyone who dared disagree a “Moscow stooge” or a “Russian propagandist.”

The ugliness penetrated into the U.S. presidential campaign because Democrat Hillary Clinton took a belligerent line toward Russia while Trump broke with the Republican establishment and called for improved ties between Washington and Moscow.

Clinton called Trump Putin’s “puppet” and – after Clinton’s stunning loss – the Obama administration floated unproven allegations that Putin had intervened in the election to put Trump in the White House.

This hysteria over Russia gained added strength because Democrats were so angry over Trump’s election that liberal and progressive operatives saw a chance to build a movement and raise lots of money by pushing the Trump-Putin accusations.

This opportunism has turned much of the liberal/progressive community into a pro-New Cold War constituency willing to engage in a new breed of McCarthyism by demanding intensive investigations into alleged connections between Americans and Russians.

From the neocon side, The Washington Post has gone so far as to promote baseless accusations from an anonymous group called PropOrNot that 200 Internet sites, including Consortiumnews.com and other important independent news sources, are guilty of spreading Russian propaganda.

However, since Trump’s inauguration, the focus has shifted to Flynn, as the personification of the effort to cool off the New Cold War, because he had phone conversations with the Russian ambassador that presumably were intercepted by U.S. intelligence.

Because Flynn supposedly misrepresented some details of the calls to Vice President Mike Pence, senior Justice Department holdovers from the Obama administration concocted an argument that Flynn might be vulnerable to Russian blackmail.

The argument is dubious because the Russians would know that the U.S. government knew exactly what the conversations entailed, so how would the blackmail work? But this “blackmail” argument is another throwback to the earlier McCarthy days when gays were barred from sensitive government jobs because of their alleged susceptibility to blackmail.

But the gambit to get Flynn worked. Amid frenzied coverage on CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post, The New York Times and the rest of the mainstream media, Flynn and the Russia détente that he stood for were not expected to be long for this world of Official Washington.

Flynn’s resignation and its acceptance by Trump also prove that these tactics work and that “tough-guy” Trump is not immune to them. While the President may battle to the end over pointless questions about the size of his inaugural crowd and his belief that he should have won the popular vote, he will cave when the pressure builds on a matter of genuine substance and real importance to the future of the world.

The so-called permanent government of Washington and its complicit mainstream media – what some call the Deep State – have taught Trump a lesson and have learned a lesson, too. They now can be expected to redouble their march toward war and more war, ironically with progressives and leftists in tow.

(Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, "America’s Stolen Narrative," either in print or as an e-book (from barnesandnoble.com).)

I no longer understand what "leftist" or "progressive" could possibly mean.

But I do remember appreciating the humanity of Eisenhower's time in office.

“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government.

Gen. Flynn was a fanatical anti-Islamic wing nut. He was, to use Trumpese, a bigly terrible choice. I’m glad he is gone. But Flynn’s sin was being loopy, not talking on the phone to the Russian ambassador. The White House and national intelligence should be talking every day to Moscow, even ‘Hi Boris, what’s new with you guys? ‘Nothing much new here either besides the terrible traffic.’

The current hue and cry in the US over Flynn’s supposed infraction is entirely a fake political ambush to cripple the Trump administration. Trump caved in much too fast. The deep state is after his scalp: he has threatened to cut the $80 billion per annum intelligence budget – which alone, boys and girls, is larger than Russia’s entire defense budget! He’s talking about rooting waste out of the Pentagon’s almost trillion-dollar budget, spending less on NATO, and ending some of America’s imperial wars abroad.

What’s to like about Trump if you’re a member of the war party and military-industrial-intelligence-Wall Street complex? The complex wants its golden girl Hilary Clinton in charge. She unleashed the current tsunami of anti-Russian hysteria and demonization of Vladimir Putin which shows, sadly, that many Americans have not grown beyond the days of Joe McCarthy.

As a long-time student of Cold War intelligence, my conclusion is that both sides knew pretty much what the other was up to, though KGB and GRU were more professional and skilled than western special services. It would be so much easier and cheaper just to share information on a demand basis. But that would stop the Great Game.

It’s sickening watching the arrant hypocrisy and windbaggery in Washington over alleged Russian espionage and manipulation. The US has been buying and manipulating foreign governments since 1945. We even tapped German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone. This week Wikileaks issued an intercept on CIA spying and manipulation of France’s 2012 election. We live in a giant glass house.

The Russians are not our pals. Nor are they the evil empire. We have to normalize our thinking about Russia, grow up and stop using Moscow as a political bogeyman to fight our own internal political battles.

Right now, I’m more worried about the far right crazies in the Trump White House than I am about the Ruskis and Vlad the Bad.

Did someone mention that Jim Hightower might have something relevant to consider?

Trump and his new blue-ribbon panel of working-class champions have announced a bold initiative to create millions of American jobs. A spokesman for the panel, Steve Schwarzman, praised Trump as a leader who wants to “do things a lot better in our country, for all Americans.”

Trump-the-candidate fulminated against such moneyed elites, calling them “responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class.” But now, in a spectacular flipflop, he’s brought these robbers directly inside his presidency, asking them to be architects of his economic strategy. Worse, he’s doing this in the name of helping workers.

Hello – to develop policies beneficial to working stiffs, bring in some working stiffs! But not a single labor advocate is on his policy council, in his cabinet, or anywhere near his White House.

Thus, the so-called “job-creation plan” announced by Trump and his corporate cohorts doesn’t create any jobs, but calls instead for – Ta Dah! – deregulating Wall Street. These flimflammers actually want us rubes to believe that “freeing” banksters to return to casino-style speculation and consumer scams will give them more money that they “can” invest in American jobs.

Do they think we have sucker wrappers around our heads? Trump’s scheme will let banks make a killing, but it doesn’t require them to invest in jobs – so they won’t. There’s a name for this: Fraud.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

This is clearly nuts, and yet, in misinfo history, it works. Keeps them on their toes.

"The fact that the supposedly damaging leaks are in fact bolstering American accusations against Iran while minimizing American complicity in Iraqi deaths leads some to believe that the leaks are in fact engineered by the Pentagon to either discredit Wikileaks, or are in conjunction with Wikileaks which is a U.S. government outfit."

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

I always try to show "Dr. Strangelove" to my college classes so that they understand the quality of leadership/thinking found among those who run the war efforts at the top levels of the USA! USA! USA!

I used to tell them that I was only being metaphorical afterwards.

Historian Margot Henriksen, author of 'Dr. Strangelove’s America,' describes the movie as a kind of expose – a frontal assault on “the cherished seriousness and rationality of America’s nuclear ethos and establishment." Strangelove showed the previously disguised cold war reality for what it was: immoral, insane, deadly – and ridiculous. Distinguished critic Lewis Mumford defended the film’s blackly humorous take on nuclear holocaust as an example of deadpan Swiftian wit: “It is not this film that is sick: What is sick is our supposedly moral, democratic country which allowed this policy to be formulated and implemented without even the pretense of public debate.”

Strangelove’s literary antecedents go back even further, to the Old Comedy of Aristophanes– the comedy of Periclean Athens, which was ribald and irreverent and deeply political. It’s a theater of living, participatory democracy, of a citizenry involved in every matter of state. Also, it’s a comedy grounded in the body and nature, as for instance in Lysistrata, in which the women of Athens bring the bloody and stupid Peloponnesian War to an end through a brilliantly organized sex strike, or in other plays, where the chorus of frogs or wasps or birds comments on human affairs from an ironic inter-species distance. The film’s insistent “strange love” sexual subtext places it firmly in the Aristophanic tradition.

The characters in Strangelove embody social hierarchies; they are flattened, if highly compelling, and command a very different kind of response than does the typical Hollywood character – a critical reaction, rather than an emotional identification. It is similar to what Bertolt Brecht describes as the alienation effect, forcing the viewer to see characters in terms of what they represent, coloring the subjective perception of objective reality, and creating the psychological conditions for both detachment and enlightened re-engagement.

Historically, 1963 was a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis and a couple of years after the Berlin Wall crisis. It was the last moment that some Pentagon brass and nuclear strategists believed that the USA would have a significantly superior strategic position vis-à-vis the Soviets, allowing the possibility of a first strike. President Kennedy was surrounded by such thinking. From the book "JFK and the Unspeakable," by James Douglass, regarding events in 1961: “His military advisors continued to ride hard toward the apocalypse. Kennedy was appalled by Generals Lemnitzer and LeMay’s insistence at two summer meetings that they wanted his authorization to use nuclear weapons in both Berlin and Southeast Asia. His response was to walk out of the meetings. After one such walkout, he threw his hands in the air, glanced back at the generals and admirals left in the Cabinet Room, and said, ‘These people are crazy.’”

Only one month after the terrifying Cuban Missile crisis, the Joint Chiefs of Staff requested a buildup of strategic forces to the level of a disarming first-strike capability. On November 20, 1962, they sent a memorandum to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara stating, “The Joint Chiefs of Staff consider that a first-strike capability is both feasible and desirable.” Their studies showed that a first strike would kill at least 140 million Russians – but that American casualties could be kept down to a “manageable” 10 or 12 million. This is almost exactly what General Turgidson says in the movie. (“Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say, no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh… depending on the breaks.”) In September 1963, Air Force General Leon Johnson said to Kennedy, “I have concluded from the calculations that we could fight a limited war using nuclear weapons without fear that the Soviets would reply by going to all-out war.”

Kennedy understood the real but unstated objective. Knowing that the Pentagon was gaming him, he responded, “I have been told that if I ever released a nuclear weapon on the battlefield, I should start a pre-emptive attack on the Soviet Union, as the use of nuclear weapons was bound to escalate and we might as well get the advantage by going first.” Again, it’s precisely the gambit attempted by General Turgidson in the War Room regarding the “unpublished study” about the correct (i.e., murderous) response to a nuclear “accident” – a study apparently not shared with the president.

Kubrick’s mind was legendarily omnivorous and retentive. He subscribed to the "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" and had read just about every book ever written on deterrence and thermonuclear war. His imagination is so rooted in hard fact that he could intuit what was taking place behind closed doors. Lyman Lemnitzer, Curtis LeMay, Edwin Walker, Herman Kahn, Henry Kissinger, so many others – like Kennedy, Kubrick realized it was a cast of maniacs that kept the nuclear show going. Kubrick and co-screenwriter Terry Southern encapsulate that insanity in the characters of Ripper, Turgidson and Strangelove – an alliance of the psychotic, the narcissistic and the psychopathic, each bizarre in his own way, but all ultimately collaborating in a genocidal groupthink.

Good satire goes directly for the insoluble contradictions, and Kubrick hits so many of them – for instance:

* Only those with a superhumanly developed self-restraint and sanity could be trusted to be in control of nuclear weapons – but only a madman could create and support the logic of mutual assured destruction and its associated concepts of “overkill” and “megadeath.”

* Also: The effectiveness of nuclear deterrence depends on a hair-trigger response to attack – so a system ostensibly intended for preventing war is constantly provoking fear, creating a spiral of suspicion in which defense and aggression become indistinguishable.

* Also: To deter, the system must be rigid and flexible at the same time, robotic and humanly controllable. An engineer will tell you that any system designed around fundamentally opposed qualities is an accident waiting to happen. It is a doomsday machine, an idiot system of world-destroying power. * Also: While the rhetoric is that of war avoidance - “Peace is our profession” – the underlying mentality is that of total victory over an evil enemy. So “accidents” are programmed in, as the pretext for a first strike with “acceptable” American losses. But the extent to which the possibility of a first strike is countenanced gives the lie to any ethical superiority over the other side. The system is morally bankrupt.

* And finally: The bomb supposedly exists to protect freedom and democracy, but at moments of crisis (which in a balance of terror means every moment), we see how the system actually functions – as the ultimate expression of elitism, accepting the very real possibility of human annihilation as the cost of dominance and control. It is the apotheosis of what C. Wright Mills, writing a bit earlier, described as “crackpot realism,” the thought process of a paranoiac. The system is politically self-deconstructing, reducing itself to rubble here before our eyes, in 90 real-time minutes.

All of these contradictions are embodied in the character of Dr. Strangelove, the crippled, fragmented machine-man who hovers like a dark angel in the corner of the War Room and our consciousness. He is the ultimate accomplishment of the film: a rich and open-ended symbol – a key to understanding both an aspect of human nature and a specific moment in time. He has become a permanent part of our culture, graphically revealing the surreal, fascistic energy that permeates the inner workings of the military-industrial complex.

In the end, Strangelove walks – he regains his potency – because this Nazi technocrat has finally become the voice of authority in the putative democracy that helped defeat his first Fuhrer. He no longer needs to conceal his nature and desires. These boil down to a sadomasochistic scenario of female sexual slavery, in which the sickest members of the military-industrial patriarchy are given exclusive right to the most nubile women. It is a eugenics-inspired rape fantasy, out-Hitlering Hitler. And the gathered War Room crowd salivates over the prospect.

We realize that the narrative arc of the movie is that of coitus interruptus, which begins with Turgidson’s painfully suspended tryst with his secretary and is consummated with the final orgasm of destruction. At last, with the end of the world, the sexual suspense is broken and we can breathe; the relief is palpable. The only kind of sexual satisfaction that can exist within the mechanized and disembodied world portrayed in the film involves violence and the projection of power, which compensates for the inner emptiness and lack of feeling in a militarist wasteland.o

This is the crux of Kubrick’s and Southern’s irony in Dr. Strangelove: that the higher the stakes, the greater the megatons and megadeaths wielded by these nuclear warriors, the more diminished and enfeebled and grotesque they become. A system that grants godlike powers simultaneously denies real humanity. In the end, loving the bomb means losing the soul.

Strangelove reveals the nuclear standoff as more than a political problem – it is also a symptom of self-alienation, of an imbalance between life and death, Eros and Thanatos. Underneath the antic surface – for instance, in the close-ups of General Ripper’s lined face and haunted eyes – there’s a tragic half-awareness of something terribly wrong. Something that may have to do with communists or fluoride or precious bodily fluids, or maybe something deeper that we no longer have the spiritual or emotional capability to understand or confront. The film is an attempt to regain that capability by seeing the situation as a whole, from a comically human perspective. The belly laughs that the movie elicits come from our core and bring us back into our full, social selves, away from the isolated, phobic, hyper-rationalized world of General Ripper and his compatriots.

Dr. Strangelove offers no solutions to the nuclear quandary. It just shows us where the logic of the system points, in terms of both origins and outcomes. By casting the nightmarish absurdity of the system in a comical light, he strips it of its metaphysical terror. Once we have seen Dr. Strangelove – the ghost in the war-making machine– as he is, we can begin the process of freeing ourselves from him."

Doesn't the mad excitement of the war crowd remind you of Hillary gleefully claiming credit for the murder of Saddam Hussein? At that time I thought she was giving this movie props.

Thanks to CP and Counterpunch for their pursuit of responsible reporting and true journalism.

Max and Stacy report on the continuing financial rape by Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street banksters:

Cirze's World

Cirze's World

Beth and Lily Calmly Monitor Farmers Market Traffic

Cirze's World

Oscar Wilde

"I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891

Harold Pinter

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless... while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

Chickenhawks Galore

Peace

"A man of peace is not a pacifist; a man of peace is simply a pool of silence. He pulsates a new kind of energy into the world, he sings a new song. He lives in a totally new way his very way of live is that of grace, that of prayer, that of compassion. Whomsoever he touches, he creates more love-energy. The man of peace is creative. He is not against war, because to be against anything is to be at war. He is not against war; he simply understands why war exists. And out of that understanding he becomes peaceful. Only when there are many people who are pools of peace, silence, understanding, will the war disappear."